Pittsburgh May 2021 – Key Take-Aways
• Susan Donkers Vice President of Strategic Development with Global Location Strategies provided a presentation on the site selection and location benchmarking process.
• Stakeholders within a company have different competing priorities, software and data collection allows them to ‘nail down’ locations and provide comparative scoring showing the different preferences of the stakeholders.
• Site selection helps their clients balance quality, cost and risk to make an informed decision while understanding the trade-offs.
• Global Location Strategies has a new tool for those that are self-performers of site selection, it is preparing for launch in June!
• Desmone Architects has a very nice diverse group of projects currently. They are very busy with multi-family working on about 1500 units. They are seeing a slight bounce back with some retail stuff also seeing some higher ed and have several office projects. (Chip Desmone)
• Marne Babich said she was ready to celebrate Tax Day! It has been a long stretch, since March 2020, that tax professionals have had to digest and learn a lot of new things with the CARES Act. There has been an extension of the ERC until the end of 2021. She said that the celebration will be short-lived as the focus will quickly move to eyeing Biden’s tax plan and what changes will be forthcoming.
• Visiting Member Mike Moore with London & Norfolk said that the ‘buzz’ right now in the Hampton Roads area is offshore wind development, the widening and deepening of the channel at the Port of VA, and the casinos. In the insurance world, he is seeing a hard market and general increases across the board, since most insurance companies have taken so many hits and increased litigation over the last year or so.
• Kim Harkobusic with Liberty Insurance Agency said development and constructions costs and wait times have increased 300% in time and money in almost every sector. If this push continues it may affect insurance premiums for replacement costs. Due to ‘social inflation’ of lawsuits, etc., being talked about on social media platforms, E & O prices are being driven upwards.
• Unemployment in the 10-county region was 7.9% for March, which is the same as the state, but slightly higher than the national average. On the bright side of things, development projects more than doubled from 37 in 2019 to 79 in 2020. (Jim Futrell).
• Gene Boyer is starting to do some affordable housing and is very optimistic of the future of it! He said that things never happen fast enough for him and would like to find a way to streamline the process of getting a house built.
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